California College of the Arts Hybrid Lab manager Andrew Maxwell-Parish spent his holiday break far away from the college, helping a community he’d never met before.

After crowd-sourcing funds from friends and family in order to travel to Kampala, Uganda, he and his "instructables" colleague Emi Watanabe flew half-way around the globe to meet Paola de Cecco, who is in charge of the 3D printers owned by local Kampala-based nonprofit, Village Energy.

Career Success: A Media Synopsis

In June 2012 the New York Times sunk its teeth into Neil Grimmer (BFA Sculpture 1995) and his human-interest, business-savvy success story with Plum Organics, the organic baby-food company that has reshaped the industry by changing not only what we're packaging but also how we're packaging it.

The designer behind the One Laptop Per Child Project, Yves Behar is truly a world-class designer, balancing aesthetics, function, and socially-based initiatives. Founder and principal designer of FuseProject, he also happens to be the Chair of the Industrial Design Department at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. Recently, he facilitated a design studio in which Industrial Design students partnered with South Korean cell phone manufacturer Pantech to design new cell-phone models, taking on the future of mobile communications and addressing the idea of emotional networking.

Clothes manufacturing and design is entering a phase similar to what food experienced in the 1970s. Spurred by the naturally available flora of Northern California, and led by the idiosyncratic political enthusiasms of the people who live there, there's a slow movement toward wearing and manufacturing sustainable clothes and linens. Duerr has taught a class at the California College of the Arts on how to color clothing without using industrial materials. Her nonprofit Permacouture Institute hopes to spread that gospel to public schools as well.

I spent the summer of 2012 interviewing some of the most influential people in sustainable fashion.
At the time, I was co-founder of a fledging apparel startup, learning all I could about eco-fashion and the state of the industry.
Among the interviewees were Sustainable Fashion Writer Kate Fletcher, CEO of SlaveryFootprint.org; Justin Dillon, co-founder of PACT; Jeff Denby, Textile Specialist Stacy Flynn and California College of the Arts Professor Lynda Grose.

So don't miss this Thursday's "METAMORPHOSIS," when the talented artist/designers from the California College of the Arts transform the Academy (and possibly you) into something unexpected. Explore a multitude of industrial, interaction, illustration, fashion, furniture and graphic designers from CCA as they showcase an amazing, cutting-edge array of work, highlighting new technologies and innovative ideas that explore the concept of metamorphosis.

Between her responsibilities running a thriving nonprofit and being the single mom of an 11-year-old daughter, Kelly Rodriguez (Architecture 1997) is always working: to support her family, enrich her community, and improve the world at large. And she wouldn't have it any other way.

Rodriguez is the executive director of ARCADE, a Seattle-based nonprofit that promotes multidisciplinary dialogues centering on the integration of architecture, design, culture, science, the arts, and everything in between. It publishes a quarterly magazine, coordinates cultural events for the community, and maintains an increasingly robust web and social media presence.

A glance at ARCADE's calendar reveals a bevy of options offered weekly for anyone interested in design, architecture, and the arts, from lectures by visiting scholars to documentary film screenings and info nights featuring free tutorials on design software.

While Poritz was studying architecture and sustainability at California College of the Arts he helped to design the award-winning Refract House for the 2009 Solar Decathlon — which got him a job with Morris Adjmi Architects upon graduating. He worked there for a couple years before making the move to Central America to work with Equitable Origin on a sustainable gas station model.